City Contemporary Dance Festival 2026 Explores ‘Time Fantasy’, Debuting in October at the East Kowloon Cultural Centre Bringing together dance forces from China, Japan, Korea, and around the globe to break new ground
Time is uncanny. A year can pass in a flash; a single second can feel very long. On the surface it ticks steadily forward, yet in truth it often shows up in our lives in unexpected forms.
Under the theme ‘Time Fantasy’, the City Contemporary Dance Festival 2026 (CCDF 2026) invites audiences to dismantle the boundaries of time through dance. Eighteen original works traverse time and space, moving between reality, dreams, memories and prophecies, sketching poetic and fantastical responses to life at this moment.
Tickets are now on sale at art-mate and URBTIX. A limited number of Festival Passes are also available at art-mate and Damai, unlocking all the festival’s highlights in one go.
Initiated by City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC) in 2017, this biennial festival is dedicated to elevating Hong Kong’s contemporary dance onto the international stage, while leveraging the city’s key influence in bridging Chinese and foreign cultures. This year’s festival gathers top forces from the global contemporary dance scene to captivate audiences at the East Kowloon Cultural Centre with several major headline works: from French dance icon Maguy Marin’s absurd existential classic May B, and Armin Hokmi’s Shiraz, which revisits an avant-garde artistic community from the past, to the closing program featuring contemporary master Jiří Kylián’s Sleepless alongside Sang Jijia’s world premiere a | ch. Meanwhile, the ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ makes its triumphant return, presenting the multi-sensory alternate dimensions of the Japanese focus, the Korean focus’s time-bending imagination bridging past and present, and the dynamic vision of young talent supported by the China National Arts Fund in the Chinese focus. In this collision of body, time, and space, a sensory feast transcending the boundaries of reality and illusion will unfold for the audience. CCDF 2026 once again convenes curators and artists from around the world, aiming to build genuine cross-regional cultural connections so that creative inspiration and collaborations may continue to bloom across time.
Opening Performance: May B | Inspired by the theatre of the absurd
From the theatre of the absurd comes a landmark contemporary dance classic: a bodily fable of sorrow and comedy that endures
© Hervé Deroo
Inspired by the absurdist plays of Samuel Beckett, the twentieth-century French contemporary dance landmark May B opens this year’s festival. The piece arrests the flow of time, freezing it into suspended moments; through stubborn, insistently physical gestures it resists nothingness, carving out both grief and glimmers of meaning within endless waiting. Ten dancers, their bodies coated in white clay and dressed in ragged clothes, move through hypnotic, repetitive steps and rhythms, posing profound questions about the human condition: loneliness, ageing, and the quiet resilience that lives within life itself.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | 23 October 2026 (Fri) 8pm |
| Venue: | The Hall, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
International Focus: Reimagining the Lost Avant-Garde Vision of Shiraz
Unbroken Persian electronic pulses revive, in the present, the fading afterimage of a time-travelling past.
© Nadja Krüger
Brought by emerging Iranian choreographer Armin Hokmi, Shiraz pays homage to and reconstructs the legendary avant-garde Shiraz Arts Festival of the 1960s and 70s. Seven dancers, moving within 50 minutes of uninterrupted Persian electronic rhythms, intertwine to weave precise yet fluid geometric body totems, unfolding a collective practice of memory and dancing together.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | 24 October 2026 (Sat) 8pm
25 October 2026 (Sun) 3pm |
| Venue: | The Turns, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
Closing Performance: ‘The Connected Stage’ Series: Kylián and Sangba
Classics never close; innovation keeps unfolding. As the closing programme of CCDF 2026, City Contemporary Dance Company presents ‘The Connected Stage’ Series: Kylián and Sangba, two contrasting yet resonant contemporary works in a final double bill. Jiří Kylián’s classic Sleepless distils the raw reality of late-night solitude through restrained, abstract movement; Sang Jijia’s world premiere, a | ch, layers bodies, light and shadow, and space to build a stage world where the real and the imagined interweave. One maps an inner monologue, the other unfolds layers of the world; in dialogue between classic and new, the theatre becomes a place to re-examine time, states of mind, and the shapes of life.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | 30.10.2026 (Fri) 8pm
31.10.2026 (Sat) 8pm |
| Venue: | The Hall, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’: Gathering Avant-Garde Forces, Igniting a New Wave of East Asian Movement
City Contemporary Dance Festival 2026 joins forces with Seoul and Yokohama to present five performances over three days as part of the ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’, featuring 14 boundary-pushing original works from China, Japan and South Korea that weave together a richly varied dance landscape.
Founded in 2017 by CCDF alongside Korea’s Seoul International Dance Festival (SIDance) and Japan’s Yokohama Dance Collection, the platform has long been dedicated to promoting and nurturing modern dance and dancers across East Asia, showcasing to the world the diverse richness of Asian bodily languages.
‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ — China
Bringing together emerging choreographers from the Greater Bay Area and the Chinese mainland, this programme foregrounds avant-garde bodily explorations, cross-media experimentation and personal narratives. Three curated performances present six brand-new works, offering a comprehensive view of the innovative wave now shaping Chinese-language contemporary dance.
Young creators deploy diverse, boundary-pushing movement languages to dissolve the limits of the real, transforming experiences of contemporary urban life into a stage aesthetic and artistic imagination charged with fantastical tension.
China I
This performance showcases high-intensity bodily collisions under the pressure of a fast-paced urban rhythm. Hong Kong choreographer Kristy Lai Kei Wong’s Before it Fades captures the faint glimmer of the body just before time dissolves; while Wu Xinyu and Ouyang Jing’s co-created VEX embodies an extreme physical rebellion—bones interlock like gears in motion, nerves tremble violently as if electrified, releasing a restless life energy. Gao Rong’s Residual Effects integrates digital art, transforming the long-lasting abnormal states of mind and body experienced by urban dwellers into a distinctive choreographic language.
| Date and Time: | 27.10.2026 (Tue) 5pm |
| Venue: | The Beats, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
| Show: | Kristy Lai Kei WONG Before it Fades, WU Xinyu, OUYANG Jing VEX and GAO Rong Residual Effects |
China II
Based in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong, the choreographic duo Wang Jiani and Feng Weidi—recipients of the Jury Prize at the Yokohama Dance Collection and the Hanover International Choreographic Award—present their new work 1 cm Off Ground. The dancers precisely embody a suspended state of ‘neither flying nor landing’, moving between touching the ground and rebounding in a continuously surging breath-motion.
Sharing the programme is independent choreographer Gunika Aniva’s Filter. Drawing from the choreographer’s own memories of growing up, the work explores how self-expression both resists and converses with the ‘filters’ imposed by society and culture. Through slow, focused bodily arrangements, personal imprints are transformed into a physical philosophy that pierces through surface appearances; between stillness and flow, it reveals a self that is fleeting yet real, and not easily defined.
| Date and Time: | 28.10.2026 (Wed) 8pm |
| Venue: | The Beats, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
| Show: | WANG Jiani, FENG Weidi 1 cm Off Ground and Gunika Aniva Filter |
China III
Hong Kong choreographers Terry Tsang and Bobo Lai co-create We are (not) Romeo and Juliet, deconstructing the romantic framework of Shakespeare’s literary classic through contemporary bodies. Combining intimate, unflinching monologues, the work leads dancers through pure, high-tension bodily collisions, confronting the imbalance, friction and emotional tug-of-war within contemporary intimate relationships, and seeking balance amid the extreme tension between love and estrangement.
| Date and Time: | 29.10.2026 (Thu) 5pm |
| Venue: | The Beats, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
| Show: | Terry TSANG, Bobo LAI We are (not) Romeo and Juliet |
‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ — Japan
One performance, two explorations. Osamu Shikata presents ur phantom eyes, our crystallized pains and Crucified Stars On The Tongue, probing a bodily fable woven from illusory gazes and traces of pain. Ayane Nakagawa, recipient of the Yokohama Dance Collection Grand Prize and the Kyoto Choreography Award, offers my choice, my body, and Anchor, skilfully blending classical ballet, traditional Noh mask imagery and street dance elements to examine bodily autonomy and the soul’s anchor between constraint and deconstruction.
Each choreographer pairs two works in dialogue, presenting an avant-garde dance landscape that crosses cultural and sensory boundaries.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | 27.10.2026 (Tue) 8pm |
| Venue: | The Turns, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
| Co-Curating Partner: | Yokohama Dance Collection |
‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ — Korea
Four avant-garde dance works join forces to showcase the powerful wave of Korean contemporary dance that transforms traditional culture into a present-day movement vocabulary.
The programme features Lee Eisul, dance director of the hit K-drama Jeongnyeon, with Aura, which reworks Korean traditional dance and props into a contemporary reflection on modern labour. Jung Bo Kyung draws inspiration from the ‘Bride Mask’ of Korea’s Important Intangible Cultural Property No. 69, Hahoe Byeolsin-gut, to release suppressed female voices in Beyond Together.
Also presented is Min Kim, winner of both the MASDANZA International Dance Festival (Spain) and RIDCC 2024 (Netherlands), whose Are You Guilty? deconstructs modern guilt through extreme spatial arrangements of tables and chairs. The line-up concludes with Choi Jong-in’s Ppong Trance, weaving folk rhythms into psychedelic electronic music and pulsating light to drive the live energy to a climax.
From cultural roots to contemporary psyches, these works compose a chapter of movement that shakes the senses.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | 29.10.2026 (Thu) 8pm |
| Venue: | The Turns, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
| Co-Curating Partner: | Seoul International Dance Festival |
China National Arts Fund 2026 Art Talent Training Grant Programme – ‘Contemporary Dance Talent Development’ Showcase Presentation
To empower young creators to step onto international stages, the China National Arts Fund 2026 Art Talent Training Grant Programme – ‘Contemporary Dance Talent Development’, hosted by CCDC, has established a systematic, multi-dimensional professional development platform. Funded under the National Arts Fund’s 2026 artistic talent training scheme, the project brings together 50 young dance artists from 19 regions across the country, offering them top-tier mentorship, cross-regional creative practice and career-development opportunities.
The training covers six core areas: choreography, dramaturgy, stage aesthetic, music, physical practice, and production and communication. Through intensive classes, local creation residencies, cross-regional joint workshops and public presentation mechanisms, the programme comprehensively elevates participants’ artistic creation and practical capabilities.
A dedicated showcase performance has been specially established as the project’s reporting presentation. Through CCDF 2026, it presents the achievements and potential of these emerging creators to global festival curators, industry producers and the public.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | 30.10.2026 (Fri) 5pm |
| Venue: | The Turns, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
Roundtable Discussion and Pitching Session
CCDF 2026 presents roundtable discussions and pitching sessions, convening local, Greater Bay Area and international dance artists, curators, producers and scholars to create a practical bridge between creation and the market. The roundtables focus on contemporary dance creation, programming, international touring and cross-cultural collaboration, fostering mutual learning; the pitching sessions offer artists a platform to present ideas, works-in-progress or ready-to-tour pieces to international curators and peers, catalysing concrete cross-regional partnerships and touring invitations.
The events are open free of charge to the public and industry professionals upon registration. Dance practitioners, arts managers, students and audiences interested in the development of the contemporary dance ecosystem are warmly welcome to attend.
| Programme Details | |
| Date and Time: | Roundtable I & II
28-29.10.2026 (Wed-Thu) 11:30am – 1pm Pitching Session I & II 28-29.10.2026 (Wed-Thu) 2:30pm – 4:30pm |
| Venue: | The Corner, East Kowloon Cultural Centre |
| Admission: | Free admission by registration |
‘City Contemporary Dance Festival 2026’ Programme Details
| Date | 23–31 Oct 2026 | |
| Venue | The Hall, The Turns, The Beats and The Corner, East Kowloon Cultural Centre | |
| Ticketing | Tickets are now available at art-mate and URBTIX | |
| Opening Performance: May B | $450, $360, $280 | |
| Shiraz | $260 (free seating) | |
| ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ China I | $260 (free seating) | |
| ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ China II | ||
| ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ China III | ||
| ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ Japan | ||
| ‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ Japan | ||
| Closing Performance:
‘The Connected Stage’ Kylian and Sangba |
$450, $360, $280 | |
| Roundtable Discussion and Pitching Session | Free admission by registration | |
| Festival Passes | Tickets available now at art-mate and Damai | |
| CCDF Pass
The pass grants access to the following programmes:
|
$1,600 | |
| HOTPOT Pass
The pass grants access to the following programmes:
|
$1,200 | |
| Online Ticketing | Art-mate | |
| Media Kit | https://qrs.ly/tehhgbg | |
About ‘City Contemporary Dance Festival’ ‘City Contemporary Dance Festival’ (CCDF) is an iconic contemporary‑dance event held biennially in Hong Kong, presented by City Contemporary Dance Company (CCDC). Through a series of performances, seminars and various artistic‑exchange activities, the CCDF connects top‑notch contemporary‑dance artists from Hong Kong and abroad with local audiences, international curators and dance practitioners, as well as promoting the development of contemporary dance and building international networks.
About City Contemporary Dance Company
Hong Kong’s flagship contemporary dance company. With a legacy of over 200 original works, CCDC embodies the city’s dynamic spirit through bold, imaginative, and boundary-pushing performances.
Under the artistic direction of Sang Jijia, the Company continues to pursue excellence in contemporary dance, explore interdisciplinary collaborations, and foster international cultural exchange, showcasing the strength of Hong Kong dance on the global stage.
CCDC aspires to make dance more accessible to the community while nurturing professional dancers. For the past three decades, CCDC Dance Centre has unceasingly offered dance courses and pre-professional training, while organising outreach programmes to promote dance in the broader community.
City Contemporary Dance Company is financially supported by the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform
‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ was launched as a collaborative effort by ‘City Contemporary Dance Festival’, ‘Seoul International Dance Festival’ (South Korea), and ‘Yokohama Dance Collection’ (Japan) in 2017. The three festivals are dedicated to nurturing and promoting dance artists in East Asia, bringing together their collective experience, expertise, and international networks.
‘HOTPOT East Asia Dance Platform’ Partners
Media Enquiries
| Bebe Chen
Marketing and Development Manager Tel：3170 9925 Email：bebe.chen@ccdc.com.hk |
